


Betrayed By Latin: The Bellamy Blake Story

by HawthorneWhisperer



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 10:42:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7973881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HawthorneWhisperer/pseuds/HawthorneWhisperer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed, erasing the last sentence he wrote, and Clarke looked up.  </p><p>“What’s wrong?” she asked.  She was curled up on his ugly old couch and at some point in the last hour she had apparently stolen a sweatshirt from his room.  He should probably close the window against the autumn chill, but he liked the crisp breeze and faint echoes of cheers from the stadium.  (He also liked the way she looked in his clothes and closing the window would probably encourage her to take his sweatshirt off and he didn’t exactly want that to happen.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Betrayed By Latin: The Bellamy Blake Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/gifts).



> (This is a very, very light M.)

Bellamy scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed, erasing the last sentence he wrote, and Clarke looked up.  “What’s wrong?” she asked.  She was curled up on his ugly old couch and at some point in the last hour she had apparently stolen a sweatshirt from his room.  He should probably close the window against the autumn chill, but he liked the crisp breeze and faint echoes of cheers from the stadium.  (He also liked the way she looked in his clothes and closing the window would probably encourage her to take his sweatshirt off and he didn’t exactly want that to happen.)

“It’s the stupid fucking ablative case, that’s all,” he grumbled.  Truth be told, he had a hard time concentrating when Clarke was around.  It didn’t used to be that way— for nearly a year she was just his upstairs neighbor and Miller’s-boyfriend’s-friend.  They passed each other in the stairwell with friendly nods, chatted when Miller and Monty dragged them to the same parties, and one time he folded the clothes she had left in the building’s dryer, and that was it.  (He was just going to pull them out, but he recognized the blue plaid shirt she seemed to live in on weekends and figured it was the neighborly thing to do.)

But this past summer campus emptied out and the building had filled up with strangers taking over sublets, leaving Clarke the only familiar face.  The friendly nods turned into beers on her tiny deck (she paid $100 more a month for it, a shocking extravagance that Bellamy nonetheless appreciated) and leisurely walks home from campus in the warm summer air.  Clarke’s art class finished a good thirty minutes before his shift at the library ended, but without fail when he left the 1970s brutalist monstrosity that was the campus library he would find her sitting on a bench underneath a streetlight, waiting.  It was nice to have the company— their building was almost a mile away— but he had sort of assumed once everyone came back for the fall Clarke would go back to her life and he would go back to his, friendly acquaintances and nothing more.

He assumed that the  _ other  _ part of their friendship would fade away too.  They never really discussed it, after all, and sometimes it seemed like it was a dream. But when he woke up and she was there, sleep mussed and smiling, it felt so real it hurt.  (It just happened one day, when he went to hug her goodbye at her door and she kissed him instead, pulling him inside her apartment with the air of a woman who knew what she wanted.)

But he didn’t fail to notice that she never touched him outside of the privacy of their apartments, and he knew what that meant.  And he was fine with it. 

Except for when he wasn’t.  

Today was the first time he’d seen her in two weeks thanks to a combination of their schedules and Clarke having to go home for an annual Labor Day party her mother hosted, and Bellamy had honestly thought that meant they were through and he was making his peace with it.  Except she showed up shortly after noon, let herself in with her key, and flopped down on his couch to work on her sketches like nothing had changed.  

(He tried not to read too much into it.)

Clarke tossed her sketchbook down and stood up, the sleeves on his hoodie falling down to cover her hands.  “I have no idea what that means,” she admitted.  “But it sounds awful.”

“It is,” he agreed, and pushed his chair back from his desk, because now she was standing expectantly next to him.

Clarke slung one leg over him and lowered herself down into his lap.  She linked her fingers behind his neck and his hands came up to steady her.  She was wearing cut off shorts and his thumbs brushed bare skin, and suddenly he forgot the translation entirely because she was smiling at him and when Clarke smiled, everything else faded away.

He kissed her— just a brush of lips, soft and familiar— and from there things unspooled, slow and easy.  Kisses and sighs drowned out the far-off noise of the game as hands searched out more and more skin.  Bellamy carried her to his bedroom, leaving a trail of clothes behind them, and when he pressed her into the mattress with his weight she buried her face in the crook of his neck.  

Clarke fell asleep after, like she always did.  That was one of his favorite things about this past summer— the way she would drift off tangled up in his arms, as if she couldn’t bear to not touch him, even in her sleep. Bellamy dozed alongside her despite the bright autumn sunshine and when he woke up she was still there, curled against him, languid and peaceful. There was a part of him that worried that this was it, that she would wake up and tell him that he didn’t fit into her life anymore.   “ _Nolo te hoc finire_ ,”  he whispered to her sleeping form.   _ I don’t want you to end this  _ seemed too big to say out loud, so he murmured it in a dead language instead because Latin was a language made for vows and whispers.

* * *

 

Clarke had left after their post-coital nap, grumbling about having to get ready for her shift at the art gallery.  She kissed him goodbye and Bellamy did his best to focus on the remaining lines of his translation with only middling success.  She certainly wasn’t  _acting_ like she wanted to end things, but once a doubt wormed its way into his brain he could never quite shake it.  She came from a different life, one with hospital charity galas, one where Christmases with only one present didn’t exist except in melodramatic movies.  She had her own circle of friends with people Bellamy didn’t know, like Anya and the rest of the women’s rugby team or that weird grad student who claimed his nickname was  _Iceman._

Bellamy’s crowd was mostly Octavia’s friends and a few of Miller’s, and it wasn’t that he didn’t make friends easily, it was just more that he already had his people.  Clarke was the sort of woman whose circle was constantly expanding, but Bellamy usually found it hard to trust someone new.  That was why the thought of going back to how things were before hurt so much— Clarke was a part of his life now, a permanent fixture that he couldn’t imagine leaving behind.  He just wasn’t sure he really fit into her life the way she fit into his.

He had moved on to his Anthro essay when he heard the key in the lock.  He figured it was Octavia, here to pick up the plants he’d been watching while she had her internship at Quantico over the summer, but in barged Clarke looking pissed as all hell.

“Why would you think I wanted to end this?” she started without preamble.  She’d changed from her cut offs and tank top into a black dress that managed to be professional and devastatingly sexy at the same time.  (God, he was in so deep.)

“What?”  He pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose and her anger seemed to falter for a split second.

“Why did you say you didn’t want me to end this?” 

“I—”

“Because if you think I’m breaking up with you, you’re insane,” she barreled on.

“How did you know?” he managed finally.

Clarke crossed her arms and rolled her eyes.  “Wells took Latin in high school.  I asked him what it meant.  But back to the point— what the hell made you think I would want out?”

“I just...I thought you’d want things to go back to how they were.”

“Do you?” she asked, something like fear flickering across her face.

“God, no.  I just meant I don’t want things to end, you know?”

“Oh,” she said, and just like that her anger deflated.  “You know, you could have said that instead.”

“ _ Nolo hoc finem habeat  _ doesn’t have the same ring to it.  You really called Wells and made him translate?”  he asked with a small smile.

“I thought you might have said...something else,” Clarke replied, a blush rising to her cheeks.

Bellamy reached out and grabbed her waist, pulling her close.  “ _ Nolo hoc finem habeat, _ ” he said and curved his hand around her cheek.

  
“Me either,” Clarke said, rolling up on her toes and kissing him.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to JennaVie for the translations!


End file.
